RIG Monsters Online Reading Journal Spring 2021

Timothy Sáenz Blog Post – The Thing Due: Friday, 2 April 2021 RIG – Monsters Prof. Scott Johnson MFA in Writing Popular Fiction Director John Carpenter’s The Thing uses elements we have recently read about and discussed, like setting, isolation, and mood under the aegis of the single-effect theory to create the horror imposed by an alien being not known or understood and that cannot be tracked swiftly enough as it takes over each person or animal at a cellular level. Carpenter skillfully uses ambiguity to raise doubts about who is who, who can be trusted, and what motivated a character to take the actions he did. The setting is a 12-man American camp (Outpost No. 31) on Antarctica in what was then present-day 1982. The really bad winter storms (apparently in February) and super subzero temperatures (to wax oxymoronic) are settling in. An estimation indicates the American camp is at least a hundred miles from the Norwegian camp, whose members discovered the alien and the flying sau...

Timothy S á enz Blog Post Assignment – An American Werewolf in London RIG – Monsters, Spring 2021 Prof. Scott Johnson Due: 25 March 2021 MFA in Writing Popular Fiction Sometimes a film impresses as being stranger than the premise with which it is associated, and if it’s purpose is to present a black comedy at which we could all nervously chuckle, it must be sculpted painstakingly by the calloused hands of a master. With John Landis at the helm, that was not and is not the case for An American Werewolf in London , a 1981 film with a mostly forgettable cast. AAWIL neither makes me laugh nor scares me. It’s just another of many Hollywood efforts cranked out by the Blah Machine. That, at the least, is my personal, admittedly subjective, take on the film. I’m not a fan of black comedies to begin with, much less poorly executed ones. David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) decide to take a hike through the Welsh hill country. Like Night of the Living Dead , they can be seen nea...

 Timothy S á enz Blog Post Alien Readings in Genre – Monsters Adj. Professor Scott Johnson Due: 19 March 2021 Alien stands regarded as one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time, directed by Ridley Scott, released in 1979, elevating a female character as the winner in a grand Darwinian struggle, and featuring one of the most iconic scenes in cinematic history: the chest-bursting birth of the xenomorph. I watched the Director’s Cut on Movies Anywhere, which ran about five minutes under two hours. The only scene added back into the film from the cutting room floor was Ripley’s discovery of Dallas and Brett cocooned for impregnation, apparently an instinctual task performed by the alien, as there is no queen to supply face-huggers in this first of what became a series of films. The centerpiece character in Alien is the alien. Scott, principal writer Ronald Shusett, and their production team create their monster by the use of mystery, a size and appearance insp...

 Today a plethora of zombie movies and television shows wash ashore of the various streaming services like so much flotsam and jetsam. The quality of such productions is as variegated as the directors who have dipped their big toes in the bloody pool. Though not the first movie ever about zombies, we can say Night of the Living Dead ( NOTLD ) is the first contemporary cinematic expression of the zombie tale. George A. Romero's "classic" is the first of several in a series he made, though it isn't clear whether this includes remakes and reworkings of the stories. It's a low budget, black-and-white film released in 1968, only five years before The Exorcist . Romero did not break ground by casting black actor Duane Jones as the protagonist, Ben, but Jones was part of a 60s wave of such integrated casting that had included Sydney Poitier in a number of films, Greg Morris in the Mission Impossible TV series, and Nichelle Nichols as Uhura in Star Trek , who also pione...

 World War Z is a clever story, a series of interviews of the people who got through an apocalyptic zombie infestation that turned the world into a feeding trough for the somehow re-animated dead: heaps of gray flesh, brittle bone, chattering teeth, and moaning mouth-holes. What World War Z teaches is the brutal war we writers will have to slog through to accomplish literary success: research. Max Brooks seems to have conducted inexhaustible research to create the characters, cultures, and settings he has pieced together to reveal the psychological and sociological weaknesses of humankind. What we are in our comfortable, distraction-filled lives is not at all what we really are when our lives, individual and collective, are on the line. It demonstrated to me, like a slap to the face and punch to my paunch, how much more research I must needs perform to imbue my own thesis project with vibrancy, imagery, and realism  to make it a tour-de-force, if I may wax trite for a moment...

  Timothy Sáenz Blog Post – “The Yattering and Jack” by Clive Barker Readings in Genre: Monsters Spring 2021 MFA in Writing Popular Fiction We have read only two stories, but when I add in the movies I have watched based on Clive Barker’s writings (the first two Hellraiser films, Nightbreed , Rawhead Rex , The Midnight Meat Train ) patterns emerge in his characterizations and in the motivations that possess his characters, and thus in the way he creates monsters and the monstrous. With those ideas in mind, I will keep front and center the question imposed upon us: how might they influence our own writing. One pattern that emerges from Barker’s writing is the presence of many monsters and/or the presence of characters who are defective. In “The Yattering and Jack”, for example, Barker offers the Yattering, a ghoulish looking demon at the base of an infernal hierarchy, his master, Beelzebub, and the quietly scheming Jack, who reminds me of a mobster who used to feign insan...